Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant recently discussed Townes Van Zandt’s terrible drug addiction that ultimately took his life in 1997. Plant discussed an A-list rock icon who is a murderer last week.
Plant said on his Digging Deep podcast, “So when it came to the track, Nothin’, I knew the story of Townes Van Zandt and I knew the remarkable canon of his work – canon isn’t the right word, far too fancy, just how remarkable. If you look at his songs how far he was into his condition and still create amazing music.”
Poppy Records’ Kevin Eggers discussed Van Zandt in an Austin Chronicle interview. Nobody disputes that Eggers and Van Zandt were close friends, even if their business relations took on a love/hate touch-and-go turn later in the songwriter’s career — rifts Eggers blames on Van Zandt’s drug and alcohol abuse.
“There was a side to him that was brilliant and unique, and a side that was determined to degrade himself and everyone around him,” explains Eggers. “There was both magic and demons.”
Eggers says those demons kept driving Van Zandt back to him at Tomato when other labels weren’t interested in signing him. He maintains that Van Zandt’s reputation for poor sales figures and self-destruction led him to be written off as damaged goods by the music industry at large. In fact, Eggers says Van Zandt’s mid-Seventies heroin habit was so bad that Van Zandt offered him the publishing rights to the songs on his first four albums for $20.
“I didn’t do it and told him that if he sold [those rights] to anyone, we’d never talk again,” recounts Eggers. Robert Plant was called a ‘jerk’ by an A-list television host earlier this week.
